Embodiments herein generally relate to electrostatographic printers and copiers or reproduction machines, and more particularly, concerns using a print driver to produce PostScript bitmap images with varying degrees of transparency.
A ready for printer file format is defined as a file format which contains both the data to be printed along with printer control instructions that can be directly interpreted by the internal processing engine of a printer or other form of hard copy output device in order to rasterize the data image onto the output media. Rasterization is the placement of image data at a specific location on the output media. Such file formats include Portable Document Format™ (“PDF”) and Postscript™ (“PS”) both manufactured by Adobe Systems, Inc., located in San Jose, Calif., USA., as well as printer control language (“PCL”), manufactured by Hewlett Packard, located in Palo Alto, Calif., USA. Examples of non-ready for printer formats include the native application file formats for personal computer application programs such as Microsoft Word™. These file formats must be first converted to a ready for printer file format before they can be printed. Furthermore, some image file formats, such as the Tagged Image File Format (“TIFF”) contain bit image data only which is already in a format which specifies its output location on the output media and does not contain printer control instructions for interpretation by the internal processing engine of the printer. See U.S. Pat. No. 7,003,723, the complete disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference, for a more complete description of printer file formats.
Conventional print drivers provide many mechanisms to produce watermarks that are embedded with a page description language (PDL) print stream and are rendered onto print media (paper, transparencies, card stock, etc.) by a marking device. However, such watermark enabled print drivers are not comparable with a commonly used file format named to as PostScript. Therefore, a member of “work arounds” have been created to allow PostScript to be used with watermarks.
One example of such a “work around” is disclosed in U.S. Patent Publication 2003/0142361, the complete disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference. Conventional PostScript watermarking solutions take a PDL file and then regenerate a watermarked PDL file. Also, conventional systems can be part of an interpreter in a printer which takes a file in a PDL and generates watermarked raster images, which are then printed. However, such conventional systems are inefficient because they require a first generation of an unwatermarked PDL file and then processing of the PDL file through a regeneration of the PDL or through an interpreted which adds the watermark.